Loving It Loud

Mike Soldano (right) in the Magnolia workshop of his company, Soldano Custom Amplification. With him are his longtime right hand Bill Sundt (left), and Don Blair (center, with back turned).

Once upon a time, a young rock and roll guitarist moved from Seattle to Los Angeles to try to make a go of it in the music industry. He may not have made it to the top of the charts, but his name is now a household word among many of the nation’s top rock musicians. 

Mike Soldano, who runs his business, Soldano Custom Amplification, from a workshop in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood, has watched in amazement as his equipment has been adopted by some of the top stars, making his name synonymous with quality in the world of high-gain (i.e., really loud) guitar amplifiers.

When he first got to Los Angeles, however, he was just a kid from Lake City who worked in auto repair shops, liked music and liked building things.

He started out building his own guitars and amplifiers in the late 1970s, his initial motivation being to make what he couldn’t afford to buy. And what’s more, he wasn’t satisfied with the sounds he got from commercial amps.

“I knew in my head what a guitar tone should be, but I wasn’t finding anything on the market for it,” Soldano says.

Mesa Boogie amps were the pinnacle of high-gain amplifiers at the time—gain being a technical term describing how much boost the original signal gets from input to output. Soldano liked their gain, but he says there wasn’t much string-to-string definition. Hit a weird chord like a D9 and the sound turned to mud.

In the mid-1980s, however, he gained valuable experience working as an amplifier technician at Stars Guitars in San Francisco, where he specialized in customizing Marshall amplifiers. Returning to Seattle, he finished putting together his first amp, which he installed in a spray-painted plywood cabinet and dubbed “Mr. Science.”

Starting in the fall of 1985, he began taking Mr. Science along when he played gigs around Seattle, and it got noticed. Soon, he had three people who wanted to buy one.

Musicians being who they are, only one, his friend Tommy Martin, followed through and made a purchase, leaving Soldano with two extra amplifiers. So he threw Mr. Science and enough spare parts for another dozen amps into his 1938 Chevy (along with a new motor), and drove to Los Angeles, then center of the burgeoning glam metal scene with bands such as Van Halen and Mötley Crüe.

Soldano admits to

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